Working with Diagrams in a Data Source View (Analysis Services)

When you initially define a data source view, all tables and views added to the data source view are added to the <All Tables> diagram. This diagram appears in the Diagram Organizer pane in Data Source View Designer, the tables in this diagram (and their columns and relationships) are listed in the Tables pane, and the tables in this diagram (and their columns and relationships) are displayed graphically in the schema pane. However, as you add tables, views and named queries to the <All Tables> diagram, the sheer number of objects in this diagram makes it difficult to visualize relationships—particularly as multiple fact tables are added to the diagram, and dimension tables relate to multiple fact tables.

To reduce the visual clutter when you only want to view a subset of the tables in the data source view, you can define sub-diagrams (simply called diagrams) consisting of selected subsets of the tables, views, and named queries in the data source view. You can use diagrams to group items in the data source view according to business or solution needs.

You can group related tables and named queries in separate diagrams for business purposes, and to make it easier to understand a data source view that contains many tables, views, and named queries. The same table or named query can be included in multiple diagrams except for the <All Tables> diagram. In the <All Tables> diagram, all objects that are contained in the data source view are shown exactly once.

Although Data Source View Designer can define multiple diagrams to make a data source view more understandable, diagrams that contain dozens of tables can be hard to read and manually rearranging table layouts is a tedious process. The Data Source View Designer can automatically rearrange tables in the current diagram using either a rectangular or diagonal layout based on the relationships between tables in the current diagram.

In a rectangular layout, the relationship lines are drawn between tables instead of between columns. Relationship lines are drawn horizontally and vertically between tables.

In a diagonal layout, relationship lines are drawn as directly as possible between related columns in tables. A relationship to multiple columns attaches to the first related column in the table. If the columns in a table are not visible, the lines are drawn to the top of the table.